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When things get warmer, the environments begin to dry. | Credit: Joe Raedle / Getty Images
The world loses fresh water at unprecedented speed, two decades have resulted in satellite data.
Measurements from the Twin Grace satellites of the NASA and the missions of Grace have shown that the amount of land loss has increased around the double area of the state of California since 2002. This includes the loss of water from surface reservoirs such as lakes and rivers and underground groundwater ladders, which are an important source of drinking water worldwide.
Mega drug regions have appeared over the northern hemisphere, with the most worst affected areas extend over the west coast of North America, Southwest America and Central America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
As a result, 75% of the world population today lives in areas that suffer from fresh water loss, with an impact on agriculture, sanitary and climate change. The trend is also likely to cause further desert formation of areas that already suffer from inadequate precipitation.
The researchers said that the loss of continental water now contributes more to the global increase in sea level than melting ice sheets.
The grace (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) and its successor-grace follow-on missions measure variations in the strength of the gravity of the earth, which depends on the distribution of the mass within the planet and landscape features on the surface. Both missions consist of a pair of satellites that react to the heaviness of the changing water masses underneath.
The study, which was headed by Arizona State University researchers, showed that even areas that previously showed tendencies to increase wetness are now drier or at least not at the previously identified pace.
“The data show that the continents have suffered unprecedented terrestrial water loss since 2002,” said the researchers in an explanation.
Dry temperatures also cause the forest fires. | Credit: Friedrich Haag/Wikimedia Commons
The scientists behind the study said that bad management of groundwater resources is the main culprit together with the effects of climate change, such as lengthy droughts in Europe and permafrost melt in arctic regions.
The data showed that drying is progressing in 2014 when the strongest El Niño-and Repeating Weather Pattern in connection with warmer sea surface temperatures in central and eastern tropical Pacific, which threw global climate off-patients. This El Niño, which lasted until 2016, brought a strong hurricane season in the Pacific region and contributed to devastating droughts in Africa and at that time record-injuring surface temperatures around the world. The subsequent inverse La Niña phenomenon, which usually makes temporary cooling easier, did not change the progressive loss of water.
Since climate medical effects are difficult to control, the researchers urge that better water management practices are urgently needed.
“Pumping the groundwater contributes to the rates of the terrestrial water storage in drying regions and significantly increases the effects of increasing temperatures,” the researchers wrote at work. “The continued overuse of the groundwater, which occurs in some regions such as California with increasing than in sustainable or decreasing installments, undermines regional and global water and nutritional certainty.”
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They added that the exhausted groundwater is not filled “on human time scales”, which leads to a “critical, emerging threat to humanity”, which is triggered by a cascade of other disasters.
“[Groundwater] Is a cross -generational resource that is poorly managed if it is managed after recent generations at all, with enormous and exceptionally undervalued costs for future generations, “the researchers wrote.
The study was published on Friday, July 25th, in the Journal Science Advances.
